A game I enjoy playing while watching movies is How would this be played if these characters were genderswapped? Would a young, female dental hygienist being stripped and molested by her middle-aged, male superior while under anaesthetic be played for comedy? Would one of her friends asking in a strained voice due to barely controlled laughter to see the photos her boss took during such an incident be treated as a reasonable, if slightly insensitive, reaction? Would the same friend sleep with the rapist boss because he was ‘really hot’ and ‘eating suggestively in front of a window’ even after she knew of the boss’s history? Probably not.
I came upon the article above after thinking back to that old 2002 comedy, 40 Days and 40 Nights. It's the one where a man tries to go 40 days straight without having sex.
There's this critical part at the end of the movie where the man is on his 40th day of abstinence. His ex-girlfriend breaks into his home, and rapes him while his arms are tied to the bed post. And this is really funny because it's on the very last day of his pledge, so to watch him get raped is like, "oh man how could things get worse for this guy?" He dreams about his love interest while it's happening, but at the end he discovers he has just been raped. After the rape she says, "relax, it's over," and then leaves.
And that's it. The movie didn't take a dark turn or twist, it's not a crime and not tragedy, it's just an unfortunate thing; him getting raped in his sleep.
What other times have men been raped, usually for laughs?
It happened on The Mindy Project, when guest star James Franco is raped while passed out drunk.
And on The Wedding Crashers, where Vince Vaughn falls in love with his rapist.
And on Get him to Greek where Jonah Hill is raped. It very much feels like the apex of the laughs are when the man openly calls the thing that has just been done to them rape.
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| Disclosure: rape may be defined as looking at someone the wrong way |
A healthy male's body responds 99% of the time when stimulated even if its against his will. A person could be yelling, kicking and screaming while being raped and still become aroused from stimulation. That stimulation may be pleasurable but doesn't mean he wants it.
Besides that, there are many things we want. Consent is about choosing between competing wants. I want an oreo, but I also want to lose weight, so wanting an oreo doesn't amount to consent towards your shoving oreos down my throat.
It feels stupid to say, because this is how we use language in literally every other situation. Heroin is also pleasurable, so when I force you to take heroin does that equals consent?
I've also heard that men can't be raped because men have patriarchy, or privilege, or structural oppression or something like this. Let me put on my fem-extremist accent, "Rape is nothing more than a vile act to exert social power and women have no historical or social power to offer up, being the victims of sexism for so long."
There argument contains more than one problem, but it seems to me that the person immediately above you in ranking is far more important than who the president is. Your boss has all the important effective power over you. They fire you, they hire you, they tell you what to do, they set your wages. While the authority very distant from you, some CEO or the president, only has some vague theoretical power. And when you start pulling century's past into the mix, the power gets even further and vaguer compared to the here and now powers.
So social power is irrelevant. What matters is the power of the rapist. Nobody is thinking about social powers while they're raping, they're thinking about sex. And their ability to take sex forcibly from another person has little to do with the powers the feminists keep talking about.
There is this way of thinking where every possible power is funneled through the narrow channel of gender oppression. This seems like epitome of narrow mindedness. I've never heard any argument like, "well, politicians have certain facial features, so there's structural oppression against all those who don't possess those facial features, so certain crimes don't count for these victims." It occurs to me that many people may not make every decision ever based on how it's going to effect some gender war that most people don't even agree exists.
Sometimes I hear a claim of special revelation you can only get by being a woman. This argument basically goes, "men and women have different experiences, their experiences inform their reason, and so you could never understand."
I don't know exactly how to deal with people who deny serious thinking and instead choose to embrace secret truth known only to them. But it reminds me of Joseph Smith, who received secret messages from God through a rock in his hat and ended up founding mormonism this way. This is the way most fundamentalist religions and cults grab their believers. They get you to believe some fundamental truth that can't be overturned by reason, and build an cockamamy theory from there.
Am I saying feminism is a cult? Maybe.
Maybe not. It bares repeating that these kinds of may not represent most feminism. I can't stress this enough. They may just an overly zealous subgroup that has hijacked the image of the main group. It's easy to take them as representative samples because they're claims are so unthoughtfully provocative that they stick in the mind, but there are lots and lots and lots of examples of feminists saying, "men can be raped too." And when I talk to feminists that personally I've worked with, they usually don't make these kinds of arguments.
SlateStar says that he doesn't understand Rape Culture. Neither does Christiana Sommers. And neither do I. Instead, it seems like rape is a special kind of evil, unless it's done to men. Weird how gender oppression works, eh?
